Abstract: This article presents the results of a research project aimed at problematizing theses on the postmodern defended by Lyotard and Rorty with respect to ethics. Although they present distinctions between themselves, both advocate the discourse of diversity. By identifying the aspiration of the subject’s autonomy as a metanarrative that must be rejected, the analogy that Lyotard emphasizes is that undertaken by the artist capable of introducing a new move in the game and reorganizing its rules. Rorty, in turn, argues that the idea of redemptive truth should be replaced by a literary culture—ironist and liberal—where individuals can be strong poets in their private lives while remaining curious and sensitive to the diversity of others. In this way, Lyotard decrees the fall of utopias to make room for micronarratives. Rorty consolidates this conception in the utopia of literary culture, supposing that artistic mimesis can inform concrete moral content concerning suffering and solidarity. Both Lyotard’s pragmatics of language games and Rorty’s neopragmatism are subordinated to the criterion of invention realized by an individual artist or strong poet. Accordingly, one must question whether this pragmatism is capable of overcoming the difficulties posed by instrumental reason, denounced by Critical Theory as predominant in modernity.